A humble vegetable that originated as a marshland plant, celery is used around the world as an ingredient and that's because, contrary to what you may think, it's the source of a multitude of flavours. Celery and mirepoix‚which relies on it,are a building block of French cooking
I haven't done one of these teaching-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggs (where does that saying even come from?) building block hacks for a while. But, following a recent conversation with a friend whose husband is intolerant to onions, I thought it timely.
Celery is an ingredient that those of you who have skimmed through my recipes—as, of course, you all do—have noticed I use a lot. This is not only because I like celery in and of itself, but for various other qualities that those of you sampling something I've cooked wouldn't experience as celery at all, but merely as part of the gestalt it brings to dishes.
In its most common form, celery is used in cooking on practically every continent. It's one of those flavours that creates polar reactions: a love-it-or-hate it syndrome. If your idea of hell is crunching on a raw celery crudités or you're unconvinced by the urban legend that male porn stars eat tons of celery to increase their climactic money shots—I'm convinced this myth was invented and circulated on the Internet by mothers concerned by their teenage sons' disinterest in healthy vegetables—some of the best ways to taste celery are pretty much not to taste it at all.
Celery is one of those vegetables that, easily used in various ways, adds depth and flavour to dishes much in the ways that onions do.
Yes, there are tons of recipes that use celery as a very present flavour, from soups and salads to achingly healthy smoothies or snacks. You'll find recipes that make celery a present flavour on this site. But, this isn't about that. This is about its other uses.
Germans love celery salt, made by combining salt with dried celery seeds or dried celery, a widely used seasoning sprinkled over salads or in sauces. And, in classic French cooking, celery is one of those baseline ingredients used to build layers of flavour in dishes. For example, it's one of the three ingredients of mirepoix, a combination of finely diced celery, carrots and onions—often twice the quantity of onions to carrots and celery—cooked on a low heat in oil or butter, avoiding browning the ingredients, and used as a base for sauces or stews, a bit of an in situ stock as it were. Certainly, it's an invaluable addition to the arsenal for many delicious dishes.
But, many French or Italian dishes with less time on their hands jump straight to browning chopped garlic in olive oil or butter, adding diced onions and sweating them, followed by generous quantities of very finely sliced celery and sweating it, in turn, as the basis for a full-flavoured sauce. So, you'll see that opening gambit crop up in a fair few recipes on here. I've yet to hear anyone tasting these dishes say, "Oh, I can taste the celery in there."
Other dishes still, such as various traditional recipes for pot-roasted lamb or chicken, eschew the onions entirely in favour of celery instead for the deep, underlying rich flavours.
This is a smart-arse foodie titbit of "insider knowledge". If you want to show off more generally, it's really useful when cooking for anyone intolerant of onions. For example, use very finely sliced celery—roughly 3 to 4 large stalks in the place of every large onion—as a substitute in sauces such as ragùs, sugos or curries. No, it won't taste exactly the same as when using onions, but it will nonetheless add depth of flavour and prevent any poor onion-intolerant diners turning painfully farty or running for the pot-pot in the middle of the night.
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